A variationist analysis of clitic climbing in heritage and monolingual speakers of Spanish

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Thomas Goebel-Mahrle
Stacey Hanson

Abstract

In the current study, we employ a variationist methodology to examine the constraints governing clitic climbing in the speech of heritage and monolingual Spanish-speaking children. Analyzing transcripts of two previously transcribed corpora of child speech, we examine clitic placement in periphrastic constructions (i.e., finite + nonfinite verb constructions) of children aged 7-8 and 10-11 years old. Although several studies have found divergences between heritage and monolingual grammars (Eisenchlas, 2003; Pérez-Leroux et al., 2011), our results provide preliminary evidence that both monolingual and heritage children acquire the same constraints on clitic placement. Additionally, our analysis suggests that differences in heritage and monolingual grammars may be more likely to emerge in experimental tasks rather than in naturalistic corpus data. 

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